The R815 is a very compact design: six fans in the middle of the chassis pull the cool air across the four Opteron socket and 32 DDR3 DIMM slots. Two risers offer two full height PCIe x8 slots each.

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Two half-height PCIe x4 slots are also available. The server contains six drive bays, all in 2.5 inch format.

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The DELL server line distinguishes itself with an LCD display that allows you to read system alerts and boot-up options. The dual internal SD modules are unfortunately still only 1GB and thus only suited for ESXi. The 1100W hot-pluggable PSU are the only available PSUs. The entire front with disk bays can slide forward to give easy access to the first row of CPU sockets and DIMM slots.

AMD and Dell also confirmed that you will be able to upgrade this server with the next generation "Bulldozer" CPUs.

"You run highly loaded Hypervisors. NOONE does this in the Enterprise space."

I agree. Isn't that what I am saying on page 12:

"In the real world you do not run your virtualized servers at their maximum just to measure the potential performance. Neither do they run idle."

The only reason why we run with highly loaded hypervisors is to measure the peak throughput of the platform. Like VMmark. We know that is not realworld, and does not give you a complete picture. That is exactly the reason why there is a page 12 and 13 in this article. Did you miss those? Reply

Hi, please use a better camera for pictures of servers that costs thousands of dollarsIn full size the pictures look terrible, way too much grainThe camera you use is a prime example of how far marketing have managed to take these things10MP on a sensor that is 1/2.3 " (6.16 x 4.62 mm, 0.28 cm²)A used DSLR with a decent 50mm prime lens plus a tripod really does not cost that much for a site like this

I may be one of the many "silent" readers of your reviews Johan, but putting aside all the nasty or not-so-bright comments, I would like to commend you and the AT team for putting up such excellent reviews, and also for using industry-standard benchmarks like SAPS to measure throughput of the x86 servers.

Great work and looking forward to more of these types of reviews!Reply

Johan -You note for the R815:Make sure you populate at least 32 DIMMs, as bandwidth takes a dive at lower DIMM counts.Could you elaborate on this? We have a R815 with 16x2GB and not seeing the expected performance for our very CPU intensive app perhaps adding another 16x2GB might helpReply

I've been looking around for some results comparing maxed-out servers but I am not finding any.

The Xeon 5600 platform clocks the memory down to 800MHz whenever 3 dimms per channel are used, and I believe in some/all cases the full 1066/1333MHz speed (depends on model) is only available when 1 dimm per channel is used. This could be huge compared with an AMD 6100 solution at 1333MHz all the time, or a Xeon 7560 system at 1066 all the time (although some vendors clock down to 978MHz with some systems - IBM HX5 for example). I don't know if this makes a real-world difference on typical virtualization workloads, but it's hard to say because the reviewers rarely try it.

It does make me wonder about your 15-dimm 5600 system, 3 dimms per channel @800MHz on one processor with 2 DPC @ full speed on the other. Would it have done even better with a balanced memory config?

I realize you're trying to compare like to like, but if you're going to present price/performance and power/performance ratios you might want to consider how these numbers are affected if I have to use slower 16GB dimms to get the memory density I want, or if I have to buy 2x as many VMware licenses or Windows Datacenter processor licenses because I've purchased 2x as many 5600-series machines. Reply

The previous post is correct in that the Xeon 5600 memory configuration is flawed. You are running the processor in a degraded state 1 due to the unbalanced memory configuration as well as the differing memory speeds.

The Xeon 5600 processors can run at 1333MHz (with the correct DIMMs) with up to 4 ranks per channel. Going above this results in the memory speed clocking down to 800MHz which does result in a performance drop to the applications being run.Reply

I know this is an old post but I'm looking at putting 4 SSDs in a Dell poweredge and had a question for you.

What raid card did you use with the above setup?

Currently a new Dell poweredge R510 comes with a PERC H700 raid card with 1GB cache and this is connect to a hot swap chassis. Dell want £1500 per SSD (crazy!) so I'm looking to buy 4 intel 520s and setup them up in raid 10.

I just wanted to know what raid card you used and if you had a trouble with it and what raid setup you used?

I recently bought a G7 from www.itinstock.com and if I am honest it is perfect for my needs, i don't see the point in the higher end ones when it just works out a lot cheaper to buy the parts you need and add them to the G7.Reply